Armor & Mobility

SEP-OCT 2016

Military magazines in the United States and Canada, covering Armor and Mobility, focuses on tactical vehicles, C4ISR, Special Operations Forces, latest soldier equipment, shelters, and key DoD programs

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said Tom Watson, senior vice president and general manager of the
Navy and Marine Corps Customer Group. "During the EMD phase,
SAIC, along with teammate ST Kinetics, will provide the Marine Corps
with 16 prototypes. The Marine Corps anticipates down selecting to
a single vendor in Summer 2018. Work will be performed primarily
in SAIC's facility in Charleston, South Carolina, where the company
is currently providing the Marine Corps with initial survivability
upgrades to 10 Assault Amphibious Vehicle (AAV) prototypes. SAIC's
solution provides the Marine Corps with an ACV that is fully-protected
and has superior maneuverability with amphibious ship-to-shore
capability. SAIC and ST Kinetics' enhanced ACV 1.1 solution, called
TERREX 2, is an 8x8 wheeled, armored ACV with improved mobility
that can transport a combat load of up to 11 embarked Marines and
three crew members through hostile territory. On land, TERREX 2's
independent suspension system improves ground mobility and ride
quality for U.S. Marines. In water, TERREX 2's hydraulically driven
propulsion systems with full independent thrust control authority
allows safe operation at Sea-State 3 and through six-foot plunging
surf.
BAE Systems completed Preliminary Design Review/Contractual
Design Review (PDR/CDR) in June and is on track to deliver vehicles
to the Marine Corps according to the customer's original timeline.
"As the original equipment manufacturer of the Assault
Amphibious Vehicle (AAV), and an equipment provider to the Marine
Corps for over 70 years, BAE Systems is proud to soon deliver 16
pre-production Amphibious Combat Vehicles (ACV) 1.1 for USMC test
and evaluation during its EMD Phase," said John Swift, BAE Systems
Amphibious Combat Vehicle (ACV) 1.1 program director. "The BAE
Systems offering uses a mature, fully amphibious, ship launch-able
and recoverable 8x8 wheeled platform developed by our partner
Iveco Defence. The vehicles were designed from the ground up as a
fully amphibious combat vehicle and is currently in production at our
York, PA facility. Our offering has a capacity to carry 13 embarked
Marines in addition to a three-man crew and has undergone extensive
testing that includes evaluations for open ocean and land mobility,
ship launch and recovery, survivability, human factors, and stowage
capacity. We also installed a new engine in the prototypes we are
building for the Marine Corps, which now includes growth beyond
690HP and has significant exportable power."
Evolving a Multi-Pronged Solution
With the cancellation of the Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle
(EFV) program in 2011, a series of studies were begun including the
high speed water vehicle effort which lasted until 2013. The Marine
Personnel Carrier (MPC) program study was a wheeled vehicle effort
begun in 2007 as a complimentary capability with EFV and also
ended in 2013. In January 2014, Marine Corps leadership convened
in the Nevada desert to test some MPC wheeled demo vehicles.
Based upon the MPC demo and results of a high water speed study
for potential High Speed Vessel (HSV), findings indicated that though
the high water speed application was technically achievable, it would
be very costly and there would be quite a few capability trades to
keep the weight down.
During testing demonstrations of MPC vehicles at Camp
Pendleton, CA, the evolution of the wheeled ACVs, with extensive
swim tests at the AVTB Amphibious Vehicle Test Branch, showed
that wheeled vehicles were capable swimmers with some variants
designed to be capable swimmers from initial concept inception.
It was also determined that in the 70,000 lb vehicle weight class
that certain wheeled vehicle designs offered the same or superior
ground mobility over tracked vehicles such as AAV. Not to mention
cost sustainability and more recent improvements of wheeled
capabilities, with the resultant determination that a wheeled vehicle
was a competitor to replace the AAV, as a capable amphibious
swimming vehicle in the 6-8 knot range, not as a high water speed.
The AAV SU upgrade is designed to enhance AAV survivability so that
they are relevant in the current threat environment as well as a risk
mitigator to the capable swimming vehicles that they have long been
proven to be.
In February 2014, USMC leadership determined a three-pronged
path forward. One path was as a risk-reducer, develop the AAV
survivability upgrade (AAV SU) which primarily provided underbelly
armor increased protection, however, in order to do that, the
upgraded platform needed to include the powertrain and suspension
to carry the added weight of upgraded armor packaging. The plan
was to upgrade a third of the fleet with these upgrades to extend
their lifecycle to 2035, with 392 vehicles seeing the SU re-packaging
out of an entire fleet of 1,058 vehicles.
The second path was to start down a wheeled vehicle path
called ACV broken into increments with the first being 1.1, to
field 204 vehicles, staying as close to industry available systems
application as possible so that they would be modified non-
developmental enabling the Corps to move out on a more streamlined
acquisition plan for initial fielding by 2020. ACV 1.1 did not involve a
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